Some of these are technical terms, some are industry terms, and one or two were coined by the people they describe. Knowing the word for a thing that is happening to you is more useful than it sounds — it turns a vague unease into something you can point at.
Attention economyVariable rewardDoomscrollingDopaminePhubbingNomophobiaRevenge bedtime procrastinationDigital minimalismDigital detoxMedia fastingTop, middle and bottom linesUrge surfingPersuasive technologyInfinite scrollProblematic useBrain rotGrayscaleFriction
- Attention economy
- An economy in which the scarce resource being bought and sold is human attention. You are not the customer of a free app; the advertiser is. What is being sold is a reliable prediction that you will look. Once you understand that, the design choices stop looking like accidents.
- Variable reward
- A reward delivered on an unpredictable schedule rather than a fixed one. It is the single most powerful behavioural mechanism known, it is why slot machines work, and it is why you pull down to refresh. If every refresh brought something good, you would get bored. It is the maybe that holds you.
- Doomscrolling
- Continuing to scroll through distressing news long after it has stopped informing you and started only harming you. The behaviour persists because the brain treats threat information as urgent, and the feed never signals that you now have enough.
- Dopamine
- A neurotransmitter involved in wanting rather than liking. This distinction explains almost everything: the reason you can crave something intensely and enjoy it very little is that the two run on different systems. Repeated stimulation pushes the baseline down, so ordinary life feels flatter and the phone feels necessary rather than pleasant.
- Phubbing
- Phone snubbing — attending to your phone instead of the person in front of you. Studied enough now to have its own literature, which consistently finds it damages relationship satisfaction on both sides.
- Nomophobia
- No-mobile-phone phobia: the anxiety of being without your phone or unable to use it. Not a formal diagnosis, but a real and measurable state. More than three quarters of adults report feeling uneasy leaving the phone at home.
- Revenge bedtime procrastination
- Staying up scrolling, knowing you will pay for it, because those hours are the only ones in the day that belong to you. The name comes from Chinese social media, and it is the most emotionally accurate term in this glossary. The answer is rarely more discipline at bedtime; it is usually more of your own life earlier in the day.
- Digital minimalism
- A philosophy, defined by Cal Newport, of using a small number of carefully chosen tools that strongly serve something you value, and cheerfully missing out on everything else. The emphasis is on what you are choosing, not what you are giving up.
- Digital detox
- A deliberate period away from screens or from particular services. At its worst, a weekend of white-knuckling followed by relapse. At its best, a structured break long enough that the compulsion quietens and you can see clearly what the screen was standing in for.
- Media fasting
- A term from twelve-step recovery for abstaining from particular media behaviours. Distinguished from a detox by intent: a fast is usually about creating space for something, and is often paired with support from others.
- Top, middle and bottom lines
- A recovery framework for behaviours you cannot simply quit. Bottom line: what you do not do at all. Middle line: warning signs and slippery situations. Top line: what you actively do instead. Far more useful than “less screen time” for anyone whose work lives on a screen.
- Urge surfing
- A technique from addiction treatment: instead of fighting a craving or giving in to it, you observe it as a physical sensation and let it rise and fall. Cravings peak and pass, usually within minutes. The skill is staying present while it does — which is, not coincidentally, exactly what meditation trains.
- Persuasive technology
- Design intended to change behaviour. It is a legitimate academic field, taught at Stanford, and the techniques it developed for good ends — building healthy habits — were adopted at enormous scale for holding attention.
- Infinite scroll
- A feed with no bottom. Its inventor, Aza Raskin, has publicly said he regrets it. Removing the stopping cue removes the moment at which you would naturally have decided whether to continue.
- Problematic use
- The term researchers use in place of “addiction”, since neither smartphone nor social media addiction appears in the formal diagnostic manuals. It describes compulsion, loss of control, distress on stopping, and continued use despite harm. Research consistently finds that problematic use predicts poor wellbeing far better than hours do.
- Brain rot
- Oxford's word of the year for 2024: the supposed deterioration of a person's mental state from consuming too much trivial online content. Not a clinical term. Useful mostly as evidence that people have started naming the feeling themselves.
- Grayscale
- Setting your screen to black and white. Removes the colour cues — the red badge, the saturated thumbnail — that a great deal of design effort went into. The cheapest effective intervention available, and it is built into every phone.
- Friction
- Anything that makes an action slightly harder. Persuasive design is largely the removal of friction; recovery is largely its deliberate reintroduction. Charging your phone in another room adds about nine seconds of friction and can change your entire evening.
The dark side of tech The statistics
Michael Mackintosh
Author · meditation teacher · founder of Digital Detox
Michael has spent much of his working life online—and much of the rest of it trying to stop that technology taking over. He has thrown a phone into a lake, locked devices in boxes and experimented with long periods offline. He writes about what helped, what failed and how to keep the useful parts of digital life.
Last updated 9 August 2026. This page is checked and corrected as new research comes out. If you spot something out of date or wrong, tell me and I will fix it.